Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

The passenger-side window whirred down and a black man wearing a yellow suit and homburg hat leaned over and addressed the kayakers as he rolled by.

“Y’all all right?”

They nodded, the driver gesturing to the opera of destruction playing out before them, as if to say, “What the fuck?”

“Them goggies ain’t shit,” said the yellow fellow. “I’ll have them off you in a slim jiffy.”

With that, great clouds of fire burst out the twin tailpipes of the Buick and it lowered its stance like a crouching leopard before bolting out of the turnout. The hellhounds dropped what they were chewing and took off after it, their front claws digging furrows in the asphalt as they came up to speed, their staccato barking trailing away like fading machine guns in a distant dogfight. In less than a minute, they were out of sight.

“I have my wallet,” said the Subaru’s owner, feeling he might have had enough adrenaline for a bit. “I say we catch a ride back to Reno. Get a room.”

“Video poker,” said the other. “And drinks,” he said. “With umbrellas.”

In a previous incarnation, he had been torn apart by jackals—black jackals—so overall, the fellow in yellow had developed a healthy distaste for the company of canines, which was why he was leading them away from San Francisco.

“You ladies doing all right back there?” he asked as he gunned the Roadmaster out of the turnout and back onto Highway 80. The big V-8 rumbled and the four chrome ports down each side of the hood blinked as if startled out of a nap, then opened to draw more air into the infernal engine. The tail of the Buick dipped and the grinning chrome mouth of the grille gulped desert air like a whale shark sucking down krill. Far below the crusty strata, long-dead dinosaurs wept for the liquid remains of their brethren consumed by the creamy, jaundiced leviathan.

“Was that them?” came a female voice from inside the trunk behind the bloodred leather backseat.

“That sounded like them,” another female voice.

“Y’all can take a peek, you need to be sure,” said the man in yellow. “Trunk ain’t locked.”

“You should go faster,” said a third voice.

“They sound close,” said the first. “Are they close?”

“They won’t catch us,” said the yellow fellow. “Them goggies ain’t shit.”

“I hate those things. They’re so barky.” said the second voice.

“So bitey,” said another.

“Well, they loves y’all,” said the yellow fellow. “That’s why y’all are along.”

“Can they bite through this metal? because I don’t think I’m ready for the above ?”

“No, not in the light. Not yet.”

“Macha, remember that time they almost tore you apart?”

“I’ma slow up a bit, ladies, so they stay close.”

A chorus of “No!” and “Oh, fuck no!” erupted from behind the seat.

Just yards behind, the hellhounds heard the voices, answered with enraged howls, and quickened their pace. The Buick jerked with impact, something hitting the rear, tearing metal, once, then again. The ladies in the dark screeched. The driver checked his side mirror and, finding it overflowing with angry dog face, slammed the accelerator to the floor, because while “them goggies might not be shit,” he did not particularly want to be proven wrong by being reduced to yellow specks in great piles of hellhound poo dropped across the Nevada desert.

“I want to make Salt Lake before they know what happened,” said the driver.

“What’s at Salt Lake?” asked one of the trunk voices.

“They’s a portal there that these motherfuckers don’t know about.”

“To the Underworld? We just got out of the Underworld.”

The yellow fellow chuckled. “Relax, ladies. We gonna dump these goggies in Salt Lake, keep ’em out of my business in San Francisco. I’ll have y’all back in some less portable darkness lickity-split, then y’all can freshen up.”

“What about the child?” asked one of the voices.

“We cross that bridge when we get to it,” said the yellow fellow.

“She’s worse than the hounds.”

“Nemain!”

“Well, she is. ”

“You know, it’s not so bad in here,” said Babd, changing the subject.

“Plenty of room. And it’s not damp.”

“And it’s warm.”

“You want,” said the driver, “y’all can stay there when we get back to the city. I get you some curtains and cushions and whatnot.”

He smiled to himself. Through many centuries and many incarnations, he had learned one universal truth: bitches love them some cushions .

They sped on, and after the two unfortunate bites, stayed just far enough ahead of Alvin and Mohammed so that from a distance, the hellhounds might appear to be particularly animated clouds of black smoke emitted from the tailpipes. They were creatures of fire and force, pursuing a yellow Buick with a creamy-white top through the desert. Like many supernatural creatures, they winked in and out of the visible spectrum as they moved, so when a highway patrolman outside of Elko, Nevada, looked up from his radar readout, first he blinked, then he was tempted to radio up the road to his colleague and say, “Hey, did you just see two pony-sized black dogs, doing seventy, pursuing a giant slice of lemon meringue pie?” Then he thought, No, perhaps I’ll keep that to myself.

About that same time, five hundred miles west, in the Mission District of San Francisco, a Buddhist nun and little crocodile-wizard guy were working out the finer points of a murder.

“Is it really murder,” said Audrey, “if he is going to jump anyway?”

“I’m pretty sure it is,” said Charlie. “I think the Buddha said that one should never injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm. If we know he’s going to jump and we don’t stop him, I think we’re going against whatever sutra that is.”

“First, that is not a sutra, that’s Asimov’s First Law of Robotics, from I, Robot , and second, we’re not just allowing him to harm himself, we’re trying to get him to do it on a schedule.”

“I didn’t know Isaac Asimov was a Buddhist,” said Charlie. “Buddhist robots. Ha!”

“Asimov wasn’t. But the robots thing is close. I mean, you”— she was about to say, You are kind of a Buddhist robot, but instead she said, “You know those terra-cotta warriors they found in China, buried since the second century B.C.? Those were kind of supposed to be Buddhist robots. The Emperor Qin Shi Huang was going to have a priest use the p’howa of forceful projection I used on the Squirrel People to put soldiers’ souls in the terra-cotta soldiers, making himself an indestructible army. It might have worked if they’d filled them with meat.”

“You said that Buddhism didn’t come to China until the fifth century.” Charlie had always had a difficult time understanding Buddhism.

“It was always there, they just didn’t call it Buddhism. Buddha was just a guy who pointed out some fairly obvious things, so we call it Buddhism. Otherwise we’d just have to call it everything.”

“Sometimes I think you’re just making up Buddhism as you go along.”

“Exactly.” Audrey grinned. Charlie grinned back and Audrey shuddered. She would not miss all those teeth grinning at her. She had been under pressure when she’d put his body together, but given the opportunity to build her perfect man again, she would definitely go with fewer teeth.

“Maybe this Sullivan guy is in someone’s calendar,” Charlie said. “If Minty can find his name on one of the Death Merchants’ calendars, then we’ll know his death is inevitable. In a way, we’ll be saving him, or his body, at least?”